Labor Dept ’s Immigration Backlog Continues Shocking Increases

David J. BierThis post is a version of a section of my paper updated with statistics from the 4th quarter of FY 2022:Processing Backlogs in the U.S. Immigration System: Describing the Scale of the ProblemThe Department of Labor ’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification (DOL-OFLC) has a narrow niche within the U.S. immigration system: certifying that employers have met the requirements to petition for their workers to receive certain temporary visas or green cards. These categories include only the following: H‑2A tempor ary agricultural workers; H‑2B temporary nonagricultural workers; H‑1B, H‑1B1, and E‑3 temporary skilled workers; CW‑1 transitional workers in the Northern Mariana Islands; and EB‑2 and EB‑3 employment‐​based second‐ and third‐​preference green card categories, respectively. In conjunction with certification, employers must often obtain a prevailing‐​wage determination that establishes the foreign worker’s salary.In 2022, the DOL-OFLC ’s backlog was nearly 250,000 cases—up from about 96,000 in 2019. The largest increases occurred among the labor certification and prevailing wage applications. Because the DOL-OFLC prioritizes the temporary worker programs, their backlogs have always remained a small percentage of the total num ber of applications received. As a result, prevailing‐​wage determinations and labor certifications end up accounting for over 90 percent of the backlog.Table 1 breaks down the DOL-OFLC processing ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs